Quote

There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Another
Bird
Today
Summer
Time
Number
Think
Watches
Thinking
Watch
Numbers
Word
White
Ground

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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
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All who love have lied.
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think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
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